How do you know now, in hindsight, who is the better ice dancer?
(Follow-up: in general, how would you know when you had goofed, or maybe there's another layer to the onion? If this question is unanswerable in the general, perhaps some personal experience on how to tell?)

This Friday I will be joining colleagues in international affairs, journalism, public policy and political science to talk about "Academics in the Media Landscape: The Role of Scholar-Columnist-Bloggers". The panel is part of Carleton's Visions for Canada, 2042 conference, which explores "the wa...

Echoing Neil and Jmcdon10: Quebec's separate immigration system. Of immigrants landing there, probably higher percentage that have planned to fan out upon landing.
Curious about the Ottawa/Gatineau dichotomy. It's kind of puzzling that near identical economic base would have such a big gap in direction, but on the ground it does look like Ottawa bedroom burbs keep pushing E/S/W much faster than their Gatineau counterparts. Maybe the culture/language and the lack of transport routes north of the river do make a difference.

Discussions about demographics are typically focused on trends in fertility/morbidity and immigration/emigration, and these are what matter at the national level. But at the local level, trends on internal migration are also important. Statistics Canada has been publishing data on inter-provinci...

Vancouver and New Westminster are historical cities with direct legislation from the Province dating back in the colonial days. Most of the municipalities where freeways run weren't "city" status when the freeways were built and had less self-government or local tax base.

In the 1950s, Vancouver began to feel the pain of traffic congestion. The travel time contour map below, taken from the 1958 study Freeways With Rapid Transit, shows how bad it was. In rush hour it took a 15 minutes or less to get from corner of Georgia and Granville to anywhere in the dark gre...

You'll probably have to stick to the back roads once the robots take over. Anyone that still "drives" along the Interstate once the robot cars are dominant are gonna look like real jerks, like the guy that insists on doing his running on a crowded downtown street.
Not that it's less safe (it's more safe, since the robots will be smarter), but people's expectations of what stands for competent road navigation will increase past most drivers' abilities.

I hate driverless cars. That is the fact that needs to be explained. Not justified, but explained. Driverless cars pose no threat to my job, my income, or my wealth. That's not it. The insurance companies, or safety-nazis, might force us to use driverless cars. That would be a threat to my enjoy...

I drove from Ottawa to Boston and return over the Civic Holiday weekend and will likely drive to Montreal for this weekend.
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Of course, it's tiring after a while, but the experience of being on the road with nothing to do but listen to music and control the car is very soothing. My passengers were a bit concerned at some stages when they'd all fall asleep but I had no problem staying up.
On the other hand, I'm quite aware I'm risking life and limb for a pretty small pleasure.
My sensible side would gladly take the auto button on a long road trip, but I would still want to take the wheel every so often. But it'd bristle me if my passengers got judgmental at that.

I hate driverless cars. That is the fact that needs to be explained. Not justified, but explained. Driverless cars pose no threat to my job, my income, or my wealth. That's not it. The insurance companies, or safety-nazis, might force us to use driverless cars. That would be a threat to my enjoy...

The term 經濟 comes from Chinese (as are many Japanese terms), but only recently became known as the term for economics in both languages.
(I'm going to switch to and from Japanese kanji and Chinese character styles as I can type in Chinese only).
經濟 is an abbreviation for 經國濟民, which literally is to 經 administer 國 the realm and 濟 support 民 the subjects. The term 經國濟民 originated in the Eastern Jin dynasty but the abbreviation 經濟 first came in the Sui, and evolved to mean the study of national and social administration. A general term for political science and political economy. The term was revived during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties as new political theories developed, and that's when the term found footing during Tokugawa Japan.
The Meiji restoration saw a mass influx of Western ideas into Japan. The first person to use 經濟 is possibly Kanda Takahira, who translated William Ellis' Outlines of Social Economy (titled 『経済小学』), or Fukuzawa Yukichi who used the term in his Seiyō Jijō. Later, Chinese scholars borrowed back the term into their own language.
So 經濟 has a strong flavour of political economy to it, which makes sense considering much of the influence came from the later 19th Century, when almost all economics is political economy, and was being studied by Asian governments desperate to learn from the success of industrialized Europe.
Even ignoring history, 経済 basically looks like "administering the support" which has a political economy tint. 経 should be read as in 経営. Not sure about any Japanese definition of 済 that isn't based on the Chinese kanji.

We all know that the word “economics” comes from the Greek “oikonomia” which refers to the thrifty management of household affairs. By extension, the origin of the term “economy” is closely related to the same term as it is from the Latin “oeconomia”, which is again from the same Greek “oikonomi...

Another classic example of cross-border bottlenecks in Africa is Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Brazzaville (Republic of Congo).
They face each other across the Congo River but the one ferry across is hardly sufficient for the two very large cities.
(It's only in the past year that Google Maps included the ferry in their routing. Before, a trip plan from one city to the other looks something like this)

The line-ups for the Kazungula ferry start two or three kilometres from the water on either side of the Zambezi river. Each line up might be 150 trucks long. But the Kazungula crossing is served by just two pontoon ferries. Each ferry takes one truck, and makes the return journey in half an ho...

One thing to consider is whether the school has a PhD stream. At Toronto, the MA program is split into a regular and a PhD stream, where PhD stream students take the PhD first-year level micro/macro/metrics by default. There are advantages if you think you'll be in academia for sure, but I'm not sure about the transferability of those credits to other schools.
More importantly, the department puts much more funding and aid to the PhD stream students. Going to Toronto for PhD stream would've been comparable to UBC for me, but regular MA would've been much more expensive.
I ended up going to my undergrad alma mater (UBC), as opposed to Toronto, in part because I didn't feel that their MA program would've pigeonholed me into a PhD later on while being strong enough to prepare for one if that's what I wanted (which, it turns out, wasn't).

Every year, thousands of international students apply to Canadian MA programs in Economics. Studying abroad represents an investment of tens of thousands of dollars. Yet, without knowledge of Canadian customs and institutions, how can a student make the best of that investment? Here are some com...

Well tonight is the next US Presidential debate and what better way to help set the stage than an economic retrospective on American Presidents and their relative performance when it comes to economic growth. I went onto Eh.Net and have obtained real per capita US GDP in 2005 constant dollars fo...

Indifference curves are inherently difficult to use as a educational tool because, in the view of the utility maximizer, 100% of the curve is irrelevant: it's outside the budget set!
I often imagine utility maximization as being a gnat in the budget set, walking around to find the highest point.
Inevitably I end up on the budget line and looking for the highest point along that line.
Yes, the highest point is tangent to a contour line-I mean indifference curve-but all of that curve is inaccessible to me. For all that I know, all those isoutility points don't exist (they do exist, because preferences are complete, but that's beyond first year).
I think I understand the whole indifference curve tangency thing because I did calculus and function maximization before, not the other way around.

Look at these curves. I see boobs like this all the time Every year, come exam time, students make mistakes that reveal a fundamental lack of understanding of indifference curves. They write "price" and "quantity" on the axes of their indifference curve diagrams, instead of "apples" and "o...

"Your Queen appears to be giving an order that is unlike any the King has ever given before. Surely people remember history."
I'd say that kings have been giving orders of their own accord rather recently. They were more like transmitting the words of the oracle of the Bretton Forests for decades before, and reading the sacred ores themselves before that.

Once upon a time there was a king. He was king because his father had been king before him, and his father before that. It was just kings, all the way back. The king gave orders, which people obeyed, because he was king. The king gave good orders, and because the people obeyed those orders, the ...

Mike Moffatt (citing other people) seems to lean toward: yes, that is an externality, or at least if we're talking about time-inconsistent preferences. Or, at least, if a Pigovian tax creates time-consistent behaviour on inconsistent individuals, and causes increased total welfare, then the case for imposing them is not different than imposing such a tax to increase total welfare by removing the disutility caused upon others.
http://economics.about.com/b/2010/03/18/can-you-impose-an-externality-on-yourself.htm

Here is a question from the final exam for my public finance course: A typical person’s demand for potato chips is given by p=5-q where q=the number of packages of chips purchased, and p is the price of chips in dollars per package. The marginal cost of producing potato chips is $1 per package. ...

Nick Rowe: "Most of us earn our income from selling our labour."
Old Ari: "But I don't have anything to sell, I buy with money I have saved"
There's something about labour, and the value of time, that take a while for people to wrap their heads around. Nobody seems to see themselves as "selling" labour before learning economics in an academic setting.
My guess is that the inflation fallacy is related to why every public policy seems to need to be phrased in "jobs" for it to get any political traction. [insert Stephen Gordon rant here]
I recall having a discussion about prices which led to me talking about market clearing through queuing, and someone else flat out refused the idea. It's as if because if I waste time in a queue, there's no obvious gains from my use of time this way (except for lower than market clearing priced goods, which seems to be forgotten), so it doesn't count as a cost because it's not "paid" to anyone else.

Sometimes I despair. Sometimes I wonder if the inflation fallacy is at the root of all the US and Eurozone troubles. It's so easy to get popular support for the idea that printing money will cause inflation, and inflation means a fall in our real income. So it's much better to have high unemploy...

One of my less fun jobs at Nexreg is taking care of payroll. This involves using the Canada Revenue Agency's very helpful Payroll Deductions Online Calculator. My only complaint with the calculator is that it is cumbersome if you would like to play around with the numbers. Suppose I give an em...